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View Full Version : Two of the NFL's greatest franchises finally meet in Super Bowl



stillers4me
01-30-2011, 09:37 PM
As a kid growing up in Appleton, Wis., about 25 miles from Green Bay, Rocky Bleier remembers the tailgate parties before a Packers game.

They began on a Friday night, usually at a neighbor's house, and everyone dressed in the green-and-gold colors of the Packers and sat around talking about their favorite players, as if they knew them personally.

"They became part of their lives," Bleier said of the Packers. "Your focus was only on one team. There were only three TV stations and there was only one game on TV, and it was a regional game and it was the Packers. That's all you had. There were no other distractions. It captured your imagination, not just the locale, but the state, much like the way the Steelers Nation was created."

Bleier was 13 when Vince Lombardi became the Packers coach in 1959 and 19 in '65 when the Packers won the first of three consecutive National Football League championships -- the second time in franchise history they had managed to win the league title three years in a row.

When he was a rookie with the Steelers in '68, the Packers already had won the first two Super Bowls, beating the Kansas City Chiefs in '66 and the Oakland Raiders in '67.
"For me, the reality of the Packers was from the 1960s on, being in junior high, high school and college," Bleier said. "They were the yard mark by which all football teams were judged. Lombardi became bigger than life and the players became bigger than life."

Little did Bleier know he would go from intimately watching one of the greatest dynasties in NFL history to being an intricate part of another.............

Read more @ http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11030/1121342-66.stm